by John Man
Often in politics, a show of self-confidence works wonders. ‘Speak softly,’ as President Roosevelt said, ‘and carry a big stick.’ Well, Saladin’s stick looked very impressive to Zangi, and he decided that it would be better to settle for a quiet, rich life rather than a noisy, violent one. There were negotiations. Zangi would give up Aleppo and promise to supply troops as needed in exchange for four much smaller towns.42 In mid-June the deal was done, formalized when Saladin and Zangi met in a tent outside the walls. The citizens of Aleppo suddenly saw Saladin’s standard flapping from the citadel. By agreement with Saladin, who with typical generosity said he wanted only ‘the stones of Aleppo’, Zangi left on 17 June with as many possessions as his entourage could carry.
Al-Khabur, on the Khabur river, Saladin’s old HQ of Nisibin, Sinjar (Zangi’s old home) and Saruj.
Three days later, Zangi took possession of his new fiefs, and Saladin made a state entry into Aleppo’s citadel. Opposition to him evaporated as if by magic and Zangi was reviled ‘as a donkey who had sold fresh milk for sour’, in the words of a catchphrase.
In June 1183, after eight years of waiting, Saladin was at last in possession of the city he called ‘the eye of Syria’ and had made himself the most powerful Muslim prince for more than two centuries, controlling Egypt, Damascus, Aleppo and a scattering of fiefs whose leaders awaited his orders. True, Mosul still held out, but Izz al-Din was encircled and impotent. The Byzantines had retreated into their own territory. It was time at last to address the task he had declared to be his destiny: to destroy the Christian intruders whose presence was a lasting shame to Islam.
Both Muslims and Christians knew that a showdown was inevitable. Saladin had an almost-united empire behind him, dedicated to recapturing Jerusalem and driving the Christians into the sea. That was an inspiring vision. The Christians had nothing comparable. They were strangers in a strange land, reliant on castles, towers and walls. To oppose and defend and hang on to what you believe is yours is not much of a vision. What would their vision have been, if they had one? A new Christian empire reaching from Europe to Asia, with Jerusalem as its capital? The destruction of all Islam? But for that they would have needed inspirational leadership and the backing of a unified, expansionist Europe. All they had was the occasional burst of energy, grand words, bluster, arguments and a lust for booty. Let alone Europe: even in the Holy Land, a Christian vision and united leadership were absent. There was no central planning for the castles, no Christian commander-in-chief – no strategy, just tactics emerging from circumstances.
Witness what was happening in Jerusalem. The Leper King, Baldwin, was a young man of remarkable qualities. But a twenty-three-year-old could not retain authority when immobilized and almost blind. His disease had eaten away at his arms and legs and eyes, until he ‘was scarcely able to hold himself up and was almost totally paralyzed’. He was closely guarded by two women, with an agenda of their own: his mother, Agnes – ‘a most grasping woman,’ William of Tyre called her, ‘utterly detestable to God’43 – and his sister, Sibylla, both of whom were determined that Sibylla’s hand-some but dim husband Guy de Lusignan would become the next king. In August, Baldwin caught a fever. Fearing the end was near, his guardians persuaded him to make Guy regent, with responsibility for all the realm outside Jerusalem, to the consternation of his principal barons.
He was indignant because Agnes was in part responsible for his demotion from the patriarchate.
On 30 September 1183 Saladin, with the biggest Muslim army to date, made what might have become his first attempt to seize the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In fact his advance stalled in the face of a strong response by the Christians under Guy de Lusignan. The two forces, both some 17,000 strong, made move and counter-move, each looking for an opening and never finding one. They stared at each other for five days, as Saladin sent out raiding parties to tempt the Christians into an attack and Guy dithered, for he was, in William’s words, ‘a man totally useless in affairs of this magnitude’. In the end both sides ran short of supplies and withdrew.
So began two years of stalemate as each side waited for an opening that never came. All Saladin could do was focus on the piratical Reynald, immovably fixed in Kerak, and thus a constant menace to Muslim traders and pilgrims travelling to and from Egypt. In October 1183, Saladin set up a joint operation with Egyptian troops under his viceroy and brother, al-Adil, with further help from Taqi al-Din, his half-brother’s son. It took time to get under way, because the siege would last a week, perhaps more, depending on if and when Saladin’s seven mangonels could batter holes in Kerak’s walls. Meanwhile, several thousand soldiers had to be fed. Saladin’s army camped for a few days 10 kilometres to the north of the castle, gathering supplies and arranging for the delivery of vast numbers of rocks. This gave Reynald ample time to gather his defence forces.
Defences he would need, not just for the castle, but also to protect some rather special guests, who by chance were there for a grand occasion. Humphrey IV of Toron (today’s Tibnin in southern Lebanon), Reynald’s wife Stephanie’s seventeen-year-old son from her first marriage, was getting married to the eleven-year-old Isabella, the younger (half-)sister of King Baldwin. Humphrey was famed for his beauty, intelligence and gentility, a combination, as an anonymous source put it, that would have suited a girl more than a teenage lad. It was, of course, all about property and politics, the idea being that Toron castle would become Baldwin’s property. In some way, the match would also allow Baldwin to repay a debt of honour incurred to Humphrey’s grandfather, who had saved Baldwin’s life four years previously. So Kerak was crammed with the great and the good, the humble and the bad, depending on the point of view. Another guest, for instance, was Queen Maria Comnena, the bride’s mother, former Byzantine princess, who married Amalric when he wanted a closer link with Byzantium. Reynald and she hated each other. This grand occasion was supposed to paper over the cracks. Royalty, aristocrats, friends, relatives, actors, dancers, jugglers and musicians – the castle was so crammed with people that they blocked the soldiers pushing through to their positions.
Kerak, like many castles, was much more than a fortress. Around the stronghold itself – towering walls set on a plateau, with steep slopes and a huge ditch along the front – was a little community of Muslims and Christians, traders, servants, pastoralists raising horses, camels, sheep and goats. At Saladin’s approach on 20 November, those who lived at the base of the fortress wanted to flee to safety inside, but Reynald refused them access, partly because the castle was full and partly because he had decided on a first line of defence on the plateau outside. Not a good decision. When Saladin arrived, he took possession of the little township. ‘So,’ as William of Tyre wrote, ‘through the rash tactics of their lord, the wretched citizens suffered the loss of their goods. All their possessions, all their furniture and utensils of every description, were seized by the enemy.’ Saladin then ordered his soldiers to storm across the ditches and up the steep slope, where they could shoot at the defenders on the bridge, who ran for safety. Among them was Reynald, who was able to make his escape only because a mysterious foreign knight called Iven wielded his sword like a windmill, holding the bridge until Reynald retreated through the gate. Meanwhile, a few remaining defenders were busy destroying the bridge, which collapsed into the ditch, leaving them to scurry inside the castle before the portcullis slammed down behind them. Saladin set up his mangonels and began a steady, round-the-clock bombardment across the deep ditches.
Schlumberger, Reynald’s nineteenth-century biographer, allowed his imagination free rein: ‘How to describe this unprecedented sight? The unbelievable noise, the constant movement in the vast mass of warriors, weeping women, terrified children, while every minute the high walls resonated and trembled under the fearful impact of chunks of rock thrown with incredible violence by the Sultan’s immense mangonels.’
In reply, those inside the castle tried to build a mangonel of their own – after all, they had enough ammun
ition in the form of the rocks flying in over the walls. By definition, the mangonel would have to be close to the walls in order to reach its targets. But the bombardment itself made its construction impossible, and the carpenters refused to work in the open.
Yet the town did not fall. The problem was the ditch. It was too deep and too steep-sided for either men or machines to get close to the castle’s walls; nor, most crucially, could the sappers. Mangonels alone, operating too far away to reach the inner town, were not enough to do the job.
As often, chivalry trumped every other consideration. Reynald’s wife, Stephanie, sent out dishes from the marriage feast to Saladin, who in his message of thanks asked which tower the newly-weds were in. On being told, he ordered his mangonels not to target it.
Sieges never lasted long, because help was always summoned by the besieged. At most, the attackers had ten days; in this case rather less because relief was on its way from Jerusalem, led, unbelievably, by the immobile and nearly blind Baldwin in a litter. There was no time to batter holes in the walls or to fill in the ditches to give access to the walls for sappers. In early December 1183, Saladin gave up the attempt and a week later was back in Damascus, leaving Reynald free to rebuild.
For the next six months, business and the weather ruled. Officials came and went. Mosul, despite many negotiations, remained untaken and unsurrendered. Saladin was eager to gather forces for a new campaign, but the winter of 1183–4 was wet, then snowy, then wet again. Saladin’s vizier and secretary al-Fadil said he hoped this was the soap that would wash clean the filth of unbelief, but troops had difficulty moving, and it was summer before Saladin could turn again to jihad.
Except that it was not proper jihad. That summer he was back at Kerak, with nine mangonels this time, smashing the fortifications and towers, and at last filling in the ditch with rubble to build a causeway across to the main gate. In Imad al-Din’s words:
On the Sultan’s orders, moveable towers were built which were placed to the fore, and then, with beams and bricks made on the spot, long parallel walls were raised, running from the suburbs right up to the ditch. These walls, one covered with roofs, were additionally reinforced with skilfully made stockades. Thus [in early August 1184] were produced three wide, well-protected passageways, in which troops could stroll at ease, and at last undertake the task of filling in the ditch in complete security.
But again, with victory in sight, a Frankish relief forced the Muslims to retreat, leaving Kerak untaken, quickly restored to its former state, and still free to raid caravans travelling back and forth to Egypt.
In Jerusalem, Baldwin died at last, in March 1185, having specified in his will that his six-year-old nephew, Baldwin V, should succeed, under the control of his uncle and Baldwin IV’s own one-time regent, Raymond III of Tripoli. Pent-up rivalries simmered.
On one side stood the ‘Old Families’ headed by Raymond. He was in his mid-forties and cut an impressive figure. William of Tyre described him: slim, swarthy, dark straight hair, imperious in bearing, ‘prompt and vigorous in action, gifted with equanimity and foresight, and temperate in his use of both food and drink’. He had been captured by Nur al-Din in 1164, and spent nine years in prison until he and the Hospitallers managed to raise a ransom of 80,000 dinars. He used the time to read as much as he could, and he remained ‘indefatigable in asking questions, if there happened to be anyone present who in his opinion was capable of answering’.
On the other side, the ‘Party of the Court’, as historians have termed them, were new arrivals, the main figures being Reynald of Châtillon, Guy de Lusignan and Count Joscelin, ‘of Edessa’ as he was known, though Edessa had been lost to the family years before. This freebooting ‘count without a county’ had been one of Reynald’s co-prisoners. Others included Jerusalem’s Patriarch, the barely literate but handsome Heraclius, who had once been the lover of Sibylla’s mother, Agnes.
The rivalries intensified when the new boy-king died in April 1186, a year after his coronation. The Party of the Court turned to conspiracy, the plot being that Sibylla, the boy-king’s mother and the Leper King’s sister, would seize the throne and make her husband, Guy, king. The master-mind of this scheme, Joscelin of Edessa, persuaded Raymond of Tripoli to go off to gather other barons, ostensibly to arbitrate on the succession. In the absence of Raymond, Joscelin summoned Reynald from Kerak, proclaimed Sibylla queen and closed the gates of Jerusalem. Raymond, furious at his exclusion, was helpless.
For the coronation, the conspirators needed the royal insignia, which were in a trunk with three locks, the keys to which were held by the Patriarch, Heraclius (no problem there); the Grand Master of the Templars, Gerard of Ridford (ditto); and the Grand Master of the Hospitallers, Roger de Môlins. Roger refused to cooperate, because he said it meant breaking his oath to the newly dead king. Reynald made an unrecorded offer that Roger could not refuse, got the key and the insignia, and took them to the Patriarch, who led Sibylla up the aisle to be crowned. Then she, as queen, crowned her husband, Guy, as king.
Nothing could have more powerfully revealed how divided the Christians were. That suited Saladin, because he was in no state to take advantage, partly because he was determined to secure more territory to the east and north, and partly because in early December 1185 he went down with a fever. The weather that winter was grim. Saladin’s secretary, al-Fadil, writing in Damascus, recorded that people could not bear to turn their faces to the wind. Strong men could not walk against it, let alone the weak, among them now Saladin, who had been campaigning, travelling and camping for the past nine months, attempting to juggle a takeover in Mosul with negotiations that would give him part of what is now southern Turkey, all to prepare for more jihad against the Crusaders. It was too much. Saladin developed a ‘quartan’ fever, one that induced a paroxysm every fourth day. He and his entourage kept the news to themselves, in order not to depress his followers and delight his enemies. He made the occasional public appearance to keep rumour at bay, while his close aides and family hoped for the best.
In mid-January, a brief recovery allowed him to put action against Mosul on hold and turn his attention to winning territory to the north. Driven by dreams of conquest, which was not strategically necessary and almost cost him both his uncertain empire and his life, he rode to Harran, 175 kilometres west of Mosul, just over the present-day Turkish border. Here he relapsed. Doctors came and went. He dictated his will. Hearts were palpitating and tongues filled with rumour, wrote al-Fadil, urging a return to Aleppo and its top-class doctors.
Then to cap it all, Saladin’s wife for the last nine years, Ismat, Nur al-Din’s widow, died. They were about the same age, approaching fifty, and quite possibly the marriage had never been consummated. It was not important: he already had a dynasty in the making, a dozen sons and unrecorded daughters by several unrecorded wives and slave-girls. Ismat was different, almost an equal. He so valued her advice and support that he had been writing long letters to her almost every day, despite his illness. In his weakened state, the shock of her death might be the end of him. Al-Fadil told Saladin’s aide, Imad al-Din, to keep the news from him and censor his incoming mail.
It was a good decision, because, after another seeming recovery and another relapse and more frantic correspondence and doctors muttering that there was no hope, the fever finally left him. It was the end of February. He had been ill for two and a half months. Imad al-Din could at last break to him the news about Ismat without fear of killing him. He was apparently strong enough to accept the blow and mourn in private, because no one recorded his reaction.
There followed a pact with Mosul, which turned Saladin’s former rival Izz al-Din into a subject. At last, it seemed, thirty-three months of fighting other Muslims was over – well, for the moment, because he did not rule all Islam, but at least he could turn from civil war to the real issue. As Al-Fadil wrote, everyone in Damascus was looking forward to holy war. This could surely be planned at leisure, since the truce with the Christians
still held and they were absorbed in their own disputes.
*
Then everything changed.
In early 1187, Reynald, secure in the knowledge that he was protected by the truce, broke it. This, for Saladin, was a final, unforgivable act of ruthlessness and duplicity, and it led directly to the climax of the war between Muslims and Christians. Of course it might have happened anyway, given Saladin’s commitment to jihad. But the cause was now deeply personal, more personal by the month, so it is worth looking more closely at what happened.
This being the month of Muharram (mid-March to mid-April), pilgrims by the hundred were returning from Mecca. Imad al-Din recorded what Reynald – ‘the most perfidious, the most evil of the Franks, the greediest, the most zealous to do harm’ – did next. Using Bedouin, ‘a disgrace to our religion’, who were scattered all along the road to Mecca, he ‘fell upon an important caravan’ – 400 camels, according to one source,44 travelling in peace – ‘transporting a very rich consignment, and seized the lot.’ They killed its escort of soldiers, led the survivors to Kerak, stole the horses and equipment, and treated their prisoners cruelly. ‘We sent him a message condemning his behaviour and reproaching him for his perfidy and violence, but he only became more obstinate . . . “Beseech your Muhammad to deliver you” was his reply.’ Off went messages to Reynald demanding the release of the prisoners, the return of the stolen merchandise and payment with interest for violating the truce. The reply from Reynald was utter disdain: he would repay nothing; king of his territory, he recognized no truce with Muslims.
The Armenian Vardan Araveltsi, ‘the Easterner’ (c.1198–1272), in his Historical Compilation.
Whatever the details, Saladin’s anger was beyond words, beyond bounds. Again, Imad al-Din has the story: ‘The sultan swore that he would take [Reynald’s] life with his own hand’ – the second time he had sworn this oath, the first having been after Reynald’s raid into the Red Sea. It was an oath that would be fulfilled in the most dramatic fashion.